The Courage Performance Blog

Among other specialties, I am a Olympic Weightlifting coach and love spending way too many hours researching all the wonderful ins and outs of the those two beautiful lifts: the snatch and clean and jerk. But for all the middle school, high school, college, and professional athletes that come through Courage Performance, my focus is not to complicate their program with the highly technical full lifts, but to increase their raw power output utilizing the power snatch and power clean. This post is dedicated to all them, and all YOU who wouldn't mind getting that power clean PR up!

1. Foot PlacementMost athletes start with their feet WAY too wide, like they're setting up in the "athletic position". But this is not the ideal position for power production. With your feet wide, you are aligning your hip joint in a more stable, and arguably stronger postiion, but not more powerful. The goal of the power clean is to move dynamically (power), so you must align those hip, knee, and ankle joints in the ideal manner. Here's how: take two steps and jump as high as you possibly can. Then repeat two more times. The fourth time, take your steps and go to jump but don't. Look down at your feet and you will have your power positioning.

2. Load From The Top, Hang. And Load Your GlutesIf you're an athlete and have no real use for the full Olympic lifts in your general program, then you can also take out performing your power Olympic lifts from the ground, it's extremely technical and again, will generally deter from the point of doing the lifts. Deadlift the weight up, and load into the hang position from the top. Here's how I teach it: We drop to the high hang (or, "pockets") by pushing the knees out without leaning forward. Then we drive the butt straight back until the barbell is just above the knees without moving the knees from their slightly flexed and pushed-out position. This should leave your torso over the bar, hamstrings taught, and glutes engaged and ready to initiate the extension. I make all my athletes do their hang power cleans this deliberately. Until they prove they can load their muscles in the proper sequence, they always "drop to pockets; push the butt back to hang; violently stand and catch!".

3. Learn The Hook GripThe hook grip sucks, and most athletes don't understand the point of doing something that sucks so much if the Olympic lifts are not the main focus of their training program. Well, think of the hook grip like you would the staggered grip on the deadlifts, it helps take the grip out of it so that you can focus on the hips! So yes, it hurts, it sucks, it's annoying, etc. But you'll be able to hang 250# (or more if you're a beast) and pull it onto your shoulders without ever worrying about the bar slipping out of your hands. DO IT!

4. Pull Under, Not UpAside from not getting full extension and pulling early/away from the body, this right here is the biggest issue I see with athletes on their cleans. It's like this: you are not trying to pull the weight all the way to your shoulders. You are trying to produce enough distance between the bar and your hips so that YOU can move YOURSELF under the bar. This is easier to understand conceptually with the full clean, but the second my athletes get to their "working weight" most of them feel what I'm talking about very quickly. if you don't pull under, you'll catch the bar low on your chest, elbows below the bar instead of in front, and either drop forward, or lean way back loading your lower back and fighting like mad to "roll" the bar up to your shoulders. Not cool. Actively pull on the bar after you explode with awesome hip extension and drive UNDER the bar so it lands squarely on your shoulders. Remember, you are performing this lift to understand and produce greater power AND body awareness/control.

5. Work In Ancillary Movements, ComplexesAll my athletes move through progressions after they learn to understand the hang power clean and can perform it with adequate control. These progressions are complexes that include hang power clean pulls, hang power clean high pulls, high hang, and pause work. One of my favorites is the following: 1 hang power clean pull w/ pause + 1 hang power clean high pull + 1 hang power clean. This helps to understand the importance of hip dominance on the lift, rather than over-utilizing the upper body/arms when pulling the bar. If you are lucky enough to have a good coach to program these complexes for you, awesome, your lifts will go up pretty quickly. If you do not, it's pretty easy to put them together on your own. Just add the movements that assist in the portions that you suck at into your complexes and see what happens. Stay light with your weights and mess around with different combinations to see what clicks for you.

There you have it! This is an absolutely awesome lift and it SHOULD be performed if you can do it correctly, under the right supervision, and incorporated into the right program. Do your research, contact me, practice, practice, practice! It'll be incredible how quickly you'll feel your power output assist your game (whatever sport you play) when using this lift.